i thing Gosling’s comments are very exaggerated by the IT media, and blogs. The truth is, C and C++ are not suited for managed code, and in the article it says nobody actually uses managed C++ in real life applications. you must make a reality check over the issue that winows is re-written using managed code.. yes programmers write good code, but they need something better than C++ for that.

Hmm, the way I see it. James is not really attacking C/C++, he’s only pointing out that Microsoft’s decision to support those in CLR in .NET .
Providing Microsoft’s track record in security, supporting C/C++ will open another can of worm.
> good code comes from programmers, not languages.
Exactly. That’s why I think it’s sad you misunderstood James’ comment. Are you going to say that everyone doing .NET is good programmer?

This “.NET is insecure because of unmanaged code” thing is really old, I was surprised to see it resurrected. The situation in .NET is very similar to the ‘native’ keyword in Java that allows arbitrary machine code to be linked in, making Java insecure. In both .NET and Java you have the choice to go fully VM, but you also have the option to open your vein to machine code if you really want. It’s disingenous for Sun to blame Microsoft for this.
The difference between Java’s ‘native’ and .NET’s unmanaged code, btw, is that .NET works a whole lot better. It’s a very clever system that allows you to subclass code in different languages.
I’m a big Java fan, but that doesn’t mean I need to pretend .NET is evil.

I was actually on a .NET dev team that used managed C++ back in 1998-99 time frame. What is now referred to as the C# language was a work in progress at the time. The core development of .NET was being written in a Java compiler that was modifed to emit IL for the CLR. The team I was on was writing an ORM (which got canned in favor of not muddying the waters for ADO.NET). We opted to use managed C++ because it was stable and what we all knew because we were all C++ Windows developers. At the time it was interesting and novel to write C++ for a garbage collected memory management system.